Today, the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are the most dynamic area of growth in the internetworking industry. Relative to computer industry's time line, the Internet has been around for ages, but the privatization of the Internet and the proliferation of the WWW has accelerated growth at a rate greater than even the most optimistic prediction.
The amount of data being transmitted over the Internet is becoming enormous in size and rich in multimedia content. The size of the web pages & offered programs are getting so big that download or display using dial-up connection is not practical, which is the method used by most of the Internet users. People are in need of speed to accomplish their tasks on the Internet in reasonable time. The Internet Industry is always coming up with new ideas and methods to provide high speed Internet Connectivity, some of the methods, which are becoming popular currently are ISDN, DSL, CABLE and last but not least wireless.
Most vendors providing wireless access are using spread spectrum radios for point to point or in some cases point to multipoint. Spread spectrum radios provide the Internet connectivity using a direct connection method. It has a limited number of channels, which can serve a limited number of people, and the speed is divided evenly among the people connected to the radio. That means if the radio is connected to a T1 (1.54 Mbps) Internet connection, then this speed will be divided among the people using it. If we connect the radio to its full capacity (254 users), each customer will get less than dial-up modem speed.